SE please acknowledge this issue

[Justever]

I'm not sure of this, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's very possible that this is the 970 itself, because NVIDIA made those with a botched memory controller which is a hardware flaw with these cards. This card is wonky because only the first 3.5GB out of the 4GB of onboard memory runs at full speed, and when memory usage goes over this for any reason, it will cause severe performance problems and errors.

There was a class-action lawsuit against NVIDIA for the 970 memory architecture. NVIDIA lost this case and had to pay millions to 970 owners.
I see this issue with this game everyday from players using the 970 card, but not with the 980. I run a 980 and haven't had these problems occur. I can say that it has ran flawless on this card.

AMD on the other hand, those cards suffer from a memory leak, and it appears to be EVERY AMD card too.

Yeah, I remember the settlement... but that doesn't explain how I went 6 months of no crashes until a specific patch was released and I don't have crashes on any other games.

[Xeon]

The patches add new elements to the game, as it does, memory usage will go up. The graphics engine was not modified during those patches, and if that wasn't causing a crash before that patch, then the blame would likely be other things in game that could be spiking memory usage.

The hardware behind a 970 and a 980 is virtually the same, aside that some of the shader units of the 980 were cut to make it a lower performing card such as the 970. The only other real difference is that when these shader units were cut, it also cut off a segment of memory, as the shader groups also have their own portion of the memory. So NVIDIA had to come up with another implemation to make use of that .5GB of memory, and that implemation has resulted with massive problems with the 970 card. If this wasn't to blame, then I or any other 980 owner should experience the errors you're describing but they don't. Everything else remains the same, including drivers. The only difference in your card and mine is a few shader units and the wonky utilization of memory on the 970.